WHAT’S the warmest, most generous-spirited question you can ask someone?
For me it’s ‘what do you think of this song?’ It doesn’t happen much, but I
love being asked it. It is a question loaded with hope and trust. It is a
friend sharing the emotional light and shade of a snippet of culture and
asking you to make a call on its merits. And that’s something I won’t hold
back from.It’s also extremely personal, and with that comes an implied and respected sense of responsibility. You might as well ask me ‘what do you think of my children?’ But unlike that question, where like most parents I’ve learned to be a skilled diplomat, with music I will always deliver a frank description of my gut reaction. To do anything else would be disingenuous.
My old school friend Andrew and I have been tic-tacking with songs and albums for nearly 30 years and asking that question over and over. Back in high school times it meant sitting in each other’s loungerooms during the last days of vinyl (before the modern revival), enjoying whole albums while we gossiped about what we’d read in the NME. By university it was mix tapes and now it’s Spotify playlists.
We’ve introduced each other to a slew of music over the years. Our ‘what do you think of this song?’ moments have morphed into CD purchases running close to the thousands. Andrew can take all the credit or blame for making me Australia’s largest collector of the recorded works of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. It’s his cross to bear.
With the music comes the gigs. We’ve been to plenty of them together. Recently they’ve favoured sit-down venues as we’ve cruised past 40. But we’ll stand and rub shoulders with the uni crowd if the band is right. And tonight feels like one of those nights.
It’s a stinking hot evening in Melbourne’s inner north in early February. Two diminutive middle-aged men make their way to a High Street pizza restaurant for a pre-gig meal. Bristol rage-merchants Idles will be our entertainers and their two albums have been on daily rotation at my place for months.
My attitude to this gig has flipped and flopped over the six weeks since I bought my ticket, and now the event has arrived. I’m truly excited to watch this five-piece bomb blast of punk(esque) noise-pop outside of the restrictive confines of YouTube but apprehensive that in the flesh it might be about bluster rather than passion. First Andrew and I must over-think what we’re about to witness, in our traditional style.
I’ve enjoyed such a visceral reaction to Idles this year that they’ve become a dopamine hit for my brain – a must-listen every day. So why am I nervous about this gig? Andrew suggests it’s just a reaction to attending something outside our comfort zone. We’ve been to plenty of loud shows, but not to anything resembling punk for well over a decade. Not since we both had kids.
We debate the likely percentage of female audience members at the show – I’m thinking around 10-15% tops, Andrew plumps for something closer to 40%. He proves a far better prophet.
Idles at first glance appear a geyser of bovver-boy male aggression, but it turns out their lyrical and public denouncement of toxic masculinity counts for plenty at this gig. The genders are close to evenly split tonight, and the vibe isn’t ‘hard man’, it’s a lot more ‘tight community’. A few Billy Bragg T-shirts are dotted around the venue, and it shows this is a crowd ready to direct any collective venom against the updated post-Thatcherite targets of Brexit and racism.
There aren’t many bands with a bigger platform right now on which to rage. Idles are just two albums into a career already on a bullocking trajectory, winning a swag of awards, strong social media approval, and impressively straggling that line between critical acclaim and commercial success.
Brylcream, Creatine, and a bag of Charlie Sheen
When describing them to other enquiring friends, I’ve tried to avoid the punk moniker as they’ve disavowed it themselves in interviews. But it’s a hard one to steer clear of, so urgent, vibrant and often downright aggressive is their music. I’ve settled on this by way of introduction because anything more poetic would sell them short – they’re a band who just don’t fuck around.
Brylcream, Creatine, and a bag of co-cay-ine.
Much of Idles’ chippiness comes from lead singer Joe Talbot’s rougher than rough upbringing – his descent into alcoholism, and his rocky road as primary carer for his mum Christine following a stroke she suffered when he was just 16. Her death in 2017 just as Idles were working on debut album Brutalism is a significant touchpoint for many of that album’s songs and her face appears on the cover art. The astonishing video clip for Mother features Talbot, dressed in a pink suit, smashing hundreds of knick-knacks in front of a large photograph of his recently deceased mum. In tribute, Christine’s ashes were pressed into 100 vinyl copies of Brutalism. As I said, Idles don’t fuck around.
My mother worked fifteen hours five days a week
My mother worked sixteen hours six days a week
My mother worked seventeen hours seven days week
So, we know what we’ve signed up for this evening in Thornbury. It won’t be a night for shrinking violets. It will be ear-drum splittingly loud, raucous and confrontational. We’re far from the oldest people in the room, but we are some of the shortest. Andrew and I have a brief shouted conversation about where the best place would be to park ourselves. As someone who has experienced a heart attack in recent years, I’m reticent to stand anywhere in a crowd I can’t move quickly away from, and pitch for somewhere near the back of the room. As someone who hasn’t experienced a heart attack in recent years, Andrew shows more bravado and encourages me forward to within 20 feet of the stage. Space here is at a premium and we cop plenty of nudges and elbows from enthusiastic punters seeking a similar vantage point.
The venue has also warmed up significantly. I’m sweating heavily, and in an admission I would never make to the twenty-somethings around me, am feeling the weight of a late night with the main act still to come.
Idles’ entry is relatively nonchalant and offhand, given the maelstrom they are about to create. They merely wander on in the semi-dark, take up their five spots on the stage and smirk a bit at each other. They reek of confidence and of a battle with audience expectations already won. They also exude rough and ready charisma They’re as comfortable being photographed in dresses as they are without any tops on and tonight it’s a mix of skin and loud shirts. Guitarist Mark Bowen’s Hawaiian top is my favourite but, like many of the garments, it won’t last long in this show.
I said I’ve got a penchant for smokes and kicking douches in the mouth. Sadly for you, my last cigarette’s gone out
Talbot is wearing a bold red sweater and he prowls the stage staring at us accusingly with piercing eyes. I am immediately reminded of Guardian writer Michael Hann’s pitch-perfect sketch of him: “with slick-backed hair, tattoos and a sizeable moustache, he looks as if he has walked off a 19th-century Mississippi paddle steamer, having fleeced the other passengers in card games”.
They kick off with Colossus, a growling slow-burner for the first three minutes of its duration (“a death-watch beetle percussion and end-of-days bassline”, as esteemed music journalist Kitty Empire described it) and the crowd simmers and burbles in expectation. They know what’s coming. There is already a singalong underway for the opening lines. Andrew and I, despite our proximity to the stage, can barely see the band. We’ve got a couple of basketball teams in front of us and our view is largely sweaty T-shirts. This problem is about to be quickly solved.
After a pregnant pause, there’s a quick tap on the snare and Colossus flips itself completely into an insane thrash-pop firebomb. The basketballers are gone as the crowd at the front suddenly becomes liquid, and for a brief second I can clearly see everything on stage. Andrew and I leap back just in time to land on the outskirts of the mosh pit and barely manage to keep our feet as the primal tenor of the gig is revealed. We bravely pop in our earplugs and watch on in bewildered awe as the band take us on the angriest, most masculine rant against angry, masculine, ranty aggression we can imagine.
It’s not exclusively their message to preach. A month later, Andrew and I will be blown away at the same venue by the charmingly named Suss Cunts, three local women with a similar capacity to energise the room and mock narrow-minded male-centric egotism. But tonight, Talbot and his crew have us captivated.
As other friends of mine (mostly corporate types) have innocently wondered while being blasted with Idles in my car, what on earth are they so angry about? The answer lies partially in a few late-70s punk staples – inequality, delinquency, rejection at the hands of the state and the middle-class. But Talbot’s central conceit in Samaritans, and one he comes back to in many of his lyrics would never have been touched by the Sex Pistols or even the more progressive works of The Clash.
Man up, sit down, chin up, pipe down, socks up, don’t cry, just lie, grow some balls, he said
He cites a recent epiphany after reading artist Grayson Perry’s punchy gender challenging treatise The Descent of Man (Penguin, 2016). Perry tears strips off modern masculinity, saying forms of it “if starkly brutal or covertly domineering are toxic to an equal, free and tolerant society”. It was a message that hit home for Idles, particularly as their lead singer underwent therapy.
“I realised that I was alone a lot,” says Talbot in a confessional interview recorded in 2018. “But not alone. I was surrounded by wonderful, supportive people but I still felt lonely. I wanted to be normal and that feeling of failure comes from a long line of things that have happened, that I’ve encountered – through advertising, people on the street, people at school, teachers (all) telling me how to be.”
The mask of masculinity is a mask that’s wearing me.
“Masculinity as a construct is dangerous, problematic and bullshit. This isolation and these cultural constructs that make men feel isolated in disguise – are something they don’t really understand or believe in.”
In the hipster hotbed of Thornbury, it seems he’s joyously preaching to the converted. But a few songs in, and as the moshing intensifies and Andrew and I shrink towards the back of the room, Talbot shows he can back up his words with actions. He stops Great mid-chorus to lambast the lagered-up male moshers and appoints a young woman pressed against the front of the stage as de facto monitor, telling her “our children and grandchildren will remember you this night, and will speak your name down the years for bringing these fuckers into line”. From this point on the crowd will leap, sway and cheer but an element of respectful celebration dominates.
Bass player Joe Kiernan is amidst us soon after, seated on the floor right in the middle of the throng, and pumping out his driving rhythms surrounded by beaming faces. It’s the kind of Kum Ba Yah meets metal moment that fits perfectly with the title of Idles’ breakthrough album, Joy as an Act of Resistance. There’s nothing scary about this band, other than the unavoidable passion of their music. It’s actually the fact they’re such a cheeky pack of ratbags that endears them to so many. ‘Never fight a man with a perm’, yells Talbot gleefully. It’s the title of Joy’s second track and the joke is appreciated that as a mantra for living, it’s not exactly one of the ten commandments.
Soon after comes Danny Nedelko, their most celebrated track. Named after a member of their support band with Ukrainian heritage, it’s the most magnificent homage to a tolerant, multicultural society imaginable. As one YouTube commenter astutely puts it, “How can a band make me both want to punch a wall and hug a stranger in one song?” To hear it in the flesh and jump around deliriously to its buzzing, thrilling sound with a like-minded community of believers feels nothing short of a privilege.
My blood brother is an immigrant, a beautiful immigrant
My blood brother’s Freddy Mercury, a Nigerian mother of three
Andrew and I debrief on this privilege soon after as we join the rest of the beaming sweat-soaked crowd out on High Street. Many of them will head to the nearby bars, their night merely reaching the half-way mark. But we’re both emotionally and physically exhausted with domestic responsibilities looming next morning. So we head home in the car and excitedly talk over each other in an effort to make sense of what we’ve just experienced.
Andrew’s music tastes veer to the more sensitive side of the spectrum so I had been unsure if he’d enjoyed the gig. He assures me the threat of being crushed was greatly outweighed by the thrill of both the spectacle and the tunes. We agree we’ve never seen a band put so much sheer physical effort into a gig. I feel drummer Jon Beavis shoulders a heavy load in this regard – almost every song requires him to pound his kit into submission lest it start to fight back at some point. There’s no resting point, there’s no retreat, there’s no half measures. And, as Andrew points out, that’s the right fit for an Idles gig. You’re all in, or there’s no point being there.
When I ask someone ‘what do you think of this song?’, the least edifying reaction is a shrug of the shoulders. I’d much rather someone absolutely hated a song and could tell me why. You would never shrug your shoulders to an Idles song. They perform confidently and without compromise. Their songs are full of wit and confrontation, but always with a knowing sense of self-deprecation. As a band they demand you join them, be part of their world and embrace a fight against privilege, racism, entitlement and indifference. They demand vulnerability, empathy, intelligence and caring about those outside your immediate circle. To the uninitiated, they’re just a spirited British retro-punk band. But to those lucky enough to tap into their world, they’re a feisty, modern beacon of light shining irrepressibly against the grey. Why do I hold them so dear? Because they’re playing what’s in my head. And clearly, what is in many others.
